Planview Clarizen Reviews

Easy to use. You can assign the resources for a project easily, see their advance and request progress report.
With few clicks you can get a global stand point of a project and see risk point and define next steps to do.
You can integrate it with outlook and get your contacts. You can access from any device.

There is not a desktop application, would be nice to count with that.

1. Unlimited email-only users. Resources that infrequently or rarely work on projects can report progress via email without consuming an expensive license.
2. Email and/or API integration with work order systems. Clarizen doesn't charge an expensive license to integrate it with other systems.
3. A modern-looking user interface with an emphasis on social media-like collaboration.
4. Lots of options for charts and graphs for reporting.
5. Can import spreadsheets and MS Project workplans.
6. Lots of training and support webinars every week.
7. Pre-recorded online training via the Clarizen University.

1. Support seems slow to respond to support requests.
2. There is currently a bug they haven't fixed yet that requires you to keep resetting column widths in reports and dashboards. They don't stick.
3. Their online self-help knowledge base seems new and thin.
4. They don't have a feature I used in other project management software to identify the last (most recent) note, comment, etc. on an item. This can be worked around via user training or some custom workflow programming but it would be nice if they built it in as others have.

Project management tool is comparable to MS Project. Users that are looking for a subscription PM product rather than purchasing MS Project may benefit from this software, but I am not sure if all PM features are available out-of-the-box at cheaper subscription levels.

Although the PM tool is comparable to MS Project, it also comes with a level of complication also comparable to MS Project. Full functionality of PM (i.e. including resource management) requires buy-in by all departments/users in the company, and this is difficult to acheive in large or diverse organizations.

Our company implemeted this software with the goal of bringing project management together with time reporting, expense reporting, and invoice processing. The purpose of implementing Clarizen was to have a centralized system where we could report project status by including all relevant metrics on the project in a list or detailed view, e.g. planned time vs. actual time, planned cost vs. actual cost, and project manager comments/narrative on goal vs. result. This purpose was never realized. Clarizen underestimated the work effort to develop customizations, which resulted in the time module never being completed, the expense/invoice modules were cumbersome to use, the related approval workflows had many problems, and support from Clarizen management was almost non-existent.

We are now taking a different approach. No longer do we believe that one system can handle all our needs, and so we have adopted different systems with some integration between them to try to bring together all project-related data.

Clarizen enabled our team to effectively manage the numerous projects we had while surfacing the insights we needed to make business decisions.

Like any software that is aimed at solving complex business problems, Clarizen had so many features that it became overwhelming to our team during implementation. When a business has to undergo major changes to their operations, it needs the transition to be as easy as possible. This is more of a critique for most large software solutions as opposed to just Clarizen.

Customization. I cannot say enough on how exceptional the Clarizen technical team is with taking our needs and making them happen in the system. One specific example is I formulated a scoring system for incoming clients that based upon how they were going to use our system would be given a "complexity" score so that I could assign higher level clients to my best employees and lower level clients to my lesser experienced employees. Clarizen took my request that I submitted and within a month had the entire scoring system automated and up and running giving me a fantastic tool to use daily.

Pricing. Clarizen needs to be able to add options on as fixed costs instead of raising the overall monthly rate. My team doesn't use every aspect of the program so when I need more of just one option in the system I shouldn't have to pay for a higher level across the board with more of all their options when I need just one. I am hoping that can change in the future to meet individual client needs.

ease of use
scalable
Social
Service and Support
customizations
Updates
Adaptability
Financial Management

Cost
Agile framework needs attention
Reporting Graphs are limited in selection
limited amount of Graphs per report
Scheduling options are limited to 24 reports , 1 per hour

-Lots of customization
-SQL-like API calls
-Detailed data
-Does what it says on the tin

-Lack of a canned process for organizations that don't know where to start
-I wish it was cheaper :)

Cloud based , good collaborative environment for project management activities like plan and workflow. Cost effective solution.

Tracking is not easy, need some improvements on functionality. Interfaces development is not easy take long time.

It enables me to make more informed decisions with more efficiency. For me it’s a good application to increase the effectiveness in supporting different work methods to even accelerate execution at the team level as well.

It’s a great helper to respond immediately and also helps in collaborating with real time information and even to highlight potential issues. I do not find any downside in it.

It profoundly covers all aspects of project management, very customisable, with advanced reporting and custom fields.

There is always a room for improvement, Clarizen is relatively a new product that needs to build an ecosystem around it. That includes more integrations with other cloud services, 3rd party products in its marketPlace, and faster customer support.

The ability to customize Clarizen is one of it's strongest features. While not as advanced as some of the bigger SaaS players like Salesforce, it still provides a robust set of features to allow you to create custom business processes to accomplish your companies goals. They compete pretty well against other companies with much larger teams.

Another great feature we use a lot is the expansive and complex WBSs you can have for projects. This allowed us to have a better sense of project flow and visibility to where our projects are at.

Our biggest struggle comes with the idea that a PSA should be a three legged stool (projects/task management, time tracking/resource management, and project financial management). We can only seem to make two work at a time with Clarizen. Our PMs want some pretty detailed project plans to really understand where tasks are and who is responsible, but when you implement that with time tracking it becomes a nightmare for resources to know where to submit there time entries.

As our organization grew, the financials and resource management became more important that detailed project plans so we struggled to find a balance of how detailed our WBSs should be because everything within the project plan was tied to time entries and drove project cost. It has become pretty administrative for some of our PMs.

All in one; Social, Work Plans, Scheduling...

The User Guide is useless.

One single platform where both project information and customer information meet, thanks to the Salesforce.com integration. This enables salespeople to keep a real-time view on margins and project progress, without them needing to ask a project manager for a status update or a meeting. The information is right there, up to date and accurate.

You need to make a solid business case and build a real plan to get the budget approved. Most companies have a lot of tools and some work together with others and... but none beat Clarizen if you ask me - it is a "one-stop" to get all information. So do the math to show you can save money by centralizing the tools, and that you can lower the time spent on managing different solutions. It helps if you show dashboards: management likes dashboards (and numbers).
Clarizen was not so easy to explain to the whole team, it is a very complete solution. So we decided to "drip-feed" it to the teams.

Flexibility/Customisation - the system is extremely adaptable and can be used for a number of functions beyond that which it was designed because of it.
Reporting - The reporting suite is excellent but there is still room for improvement in terms of pivots and lining relevant data in reports.

Support - Although our setup support was great there can be a delay in resolving system bugs but no more than most software services.
Caps on custom fields - There are caps on customisation depending on the package you choose and the price hike between them can be quite significant.

Extremely flexible in all aspects of the solution. The end user can customize the views to best fit his specific work requirements. Sys Admins can configure the system to provide custom functionality. Software updates occur regularly and they provide meaningful enhancements and bug fixes. Support has been great.

Honestly, not come to mind.

The ability to automatically track the tasks start/end dates if there are dependencies set up as well as when there are vacations or holidays for a person. The automatic smart systems make huge help for any human mistake on those calcualtions and future possible changes. Thanks for this!

When someone creates a vacation request in Clarizen, it would be good to have a notification mechanism to inform the project manager about it, if the person is assigned to a task of this PM's project(s). Otherwise, only the direct manager of the person is being announced. And if there is no established manual process, the vacation request gets approved without the PM being informed about it. This is really serious problem.

It is Microsoft Project Management on steroids. It gives you the same capability to manage a project but adds features to provide a complete solution. Easy customization to fit each department needs. Resource Management across of projects, Collaboration at all levels, robust reporting module...

The reporting module provides the capability to easily create dashboards. I have created dashboards for every level and function of the organization. However, it is difficult for a manager to see his staff's dashboard.

The almost unlimited features and options

There are almost too many choices, it takes a while to really gain a full understanding of how everything works

The tool offers A LOT of functionality. As I'm not a system administrator, I am not aware of everything that Clarizen can do, but whenever our admins unleash a new feature, I'm always excited by it. The new Android app is super nice/handy to have, especially for logging time. The support is great: we have logged bugs before, and these are generally resolved very fast. I am not blocked for long whenever something like that happens.

The fact that there are so many features also has a downside. I feel like there is a lot more to discover, and sometimes, things are no consistent. For example, in some views, I can hide the right-hand vertical "space" (or menu) and in others, I can't. I also find that column resizing is quite burdensome, and I have to resize columns in multiple views (it doesn't propagate.)

It's like the rolls royce of project management systems. Super powerful and hard to really throw stones at the functionality.

The biggest learning curve because it has specific ways that it manages workflows. It's great. But you need a dedicated team member to just learn and train people on it.

The user friendliness of Clarizen can not be beat. Recently, our company moved to Clarizen for project tracking and the transition couldn't have been easier. Employees rave about the ease of the system.

If i had to choose, the disconnect between Projects and tasks on the same view.
It would be nice to have these without the need of workflows to integrate them.

It's easy to use and to change configuration or customize to best meet your user's needs.

Cost management is great but could use the concept of effective date to make it easy to use when spanning the fiscal year or promoting individuals.

At its core, Clarion is a strong project portfolio management tool. The social media element is seamlessly incorporated and has added a valuable dimension to project management. The resource management component is strong and just got stronger with the Summer '15 update. And, most important, Clarizen provides a high-availability SaaS platform. They haven't left me hanging.

I am still waiting for a mechanism to assign multiple managers to a task. Our projects span multiple shifts. I need a mechanism to allow all shift supervisors to adjust tasks and sub-tasks as needed.

The pricing model could be improved. The number of customizations are limited in all except the Enterprise package. We use all three customizations in our package and, at times, turn some off so we can turn others on. Surely a better balance can be reached.

Working with Clarizen is always easy, they are incredibly helpful and their Professional Services support is outstanding. Developing a custom timesheet module for our specific needs was never a problem for them and they have delivered far in excess of the original brief.

The layout and format of the system is so intuitive we have not needed to undertake lengthy training sessions to our users, almost all have found themselves navigating and operating without issue with only a basic introductory training session.

The only area where development is still required is the reporting tools. These tools are good, but they are not at the high level that I would want. That said there is significant development taking place that I am aware of and updates are made to improve this area particularly on a regular basis.

The tool does have the ability to export almost all data to Excel so if you can't do something within the reporting tools available, you probably can externally.